Governance: An international journal of policy, administration and institutions

Strategic planning in the European Commission

“People say, ‘the Commission is incapable of being managed,'” a former EC strategic planner told Michael Barzelay and Anne Sofie Jacobsen in 2004. “And I think we were slightly countercultural in that we were trying to say, ‘oh well, we will manage.'” The experience of implementing the European Commission’s new strategic planning and programming system is described in their article, Theorizing Implementation of Public Management Policy Reforms: A Case Study of Strategic Planning and Programming in the European Commission, in the current issue of Governance (April 2009, 22.2). Barzelay and Jacobsen explain how a team of planners approached formidable institutional and cultural barriers to change. The article contributes to the implementation literature, arguing that agents of change must attain — and exploit — “certification” as agents of reform.